paragrammatism [Grk pará ‘beside, along; in transgression of,’ grámma ‘writing’]

In neurolinguistics and speech-language pathology, a term referring to a feature of acquired language disorder, with languagespecific characteristics (see also Bates et al. 1987). In English, paragrammatism is characterized by substitution errors of function words. The term, introduced by K.Kleist in 1914, was identified as a feature of Wernicke’s aphasia in contrast with agrammatism in Broca’s aphasia (see de Bleser 1987). Paragrammatism, for a time, was considered a virtual synonym for Wernicke’s aphasia. This strict association can no longer be maintained, since a given patient may produce agrammatical utterances in spontaneous speech and paragrammatical utterances in experimental situations (see Heeschen 1985).